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Tuesday, May 12, 2015

A FIGHTER’S TRAIL TO THE ALASKAN GOLD
RUSHThis week Duane Spurlock gives us his
take on writing the latest Fight Card release, Fighting Alaska…1900
Alaska…Gold, greed, and gamblers – a dangerous combination in a gold rush
boomtown. Itinerant boxer Jean St. Vrain has a lifetime of rootless wandering
behind him and ten years of knuckle-busting boxing, bar bouncing, and
disillusionment. He wants to call quits to the fight game, but he needs a way
out. Joining a mob of desperate men heading for the Alaskan gold fields, Jean
is caught between crooked judges, crooked businessmen, a soiled dove, and
infamous gunman Wyatt Earp and his cronies. With his future looking as harsh as
the Alaskan landscape, Jean has one chance left – fight again.

DUANE SPURLOCK

Fighting Alaska came to be
written thanks to several influences, which I can boil down to four: magazine
articles, North Western pulp fiction, histories of the American Wild West, and
movies.First
and simplest: Esquire introduced me
to boxing.Oh,
I knew boxing was there – fights were broadcast on TV, and I recall the topics
of Cassius Clay changing his name to Muhammad Ali and then his refusing to
support the Vietnam War being loudly discussed whenever the aunts and uncles
gathered during the period otherwise known as The Summer of Love. But our family was a baseball family. My father
would come home Saturday afternoons for a late lunch so he could watch some of
the Major League Baseball Game of the
Week broadcast before returning to work. During
the evenings, he would sit in the dark on the picnic table and smoke half a
cigar while listening to a game – usually the Braves, sometimes the Cardinals –
on a transistor radio. After the game he would save the second half of his
cigar in a tray on top of the water heater for a future game. He encouraged me
to play baseball starting in the coach-pitch leagues at school starting in the
summer before fifth grade. My interest in the game has continued since then.But
boxing was just something outside my ken. The closest thing to boxing I
encountered was watching the weekend broadcasts of Nashville wrestling – the
names and dynamics weren’t so different from the entertainment I got from
reading comic books or watching Tarzan movies (which typically followed the
wrestling matches).Until
I opened the Super Sports issue of Esquire,
dated October 1974.It
was in a slithery stack of glossy magazines – Sports Afield, Field &
Stream, Boys’ Life – at the
barber shop. It was a three-chair shop, but I’d only ever seen two chairs used,
one by the owner, one by whomever was his employee at the time. I’d finally
outgrown the mandatory buzz cut and had been allowed to grow my hair long
enough to comb it with a part. Clearly this was an auspicious sign for
expanding my sporting horizons beyond the baseball diamond. Among
essays on baseball, basketball, and football, the Super Sports issue carried
only a two-page spread devoted to boxing, and fewer than a dozen words, but the
two photographs by Pierre Houles represented more than two thousand verbs,
nouns, or adjectives: under a hyperbolic headline on page 144, Actual Size!, was a photo of George
Foreman’s left fist facing a photo of Muhammad Ali’s right fist on page 145.
Both were wrapped in tape. I’m sure my eyes popped like tree galls. I was
flabbergasted, gob smacked, floored. Each of those clenched hands was bigger
than my head!Such
was my introduction to boxing.Like
most of the rest of the country, I was swept along in the mass popularity of
boxing launched by the success of the 1976 Olympic boxing team and its
remarkable lineup of Sugar Ray Leonard, Leon and Michael Spinks, Howard Davis,
Jr., Leo Randolph, Charles Mooney and John Tate. Even after that boom dwindled
as those fighters rolled through their professional careers, I sought out and
read about boxing by writers like A.J. Liebling and Hugh Fullerton – the latter
better known for his investigation of the 1919 Black Sox scandal. These
pursuits eventually led me to an article in the February 1998 issue of Vanity Fair, The Outlaw Champ by Nick Tosches, which he expanded into my
favorite nonfiction book on boxing, The
Devil and Sonny Liston (also published later under Tosches’ original title,
Night Train).Second
influence: The Wild West.I’ve
been a reader of westerns since I discovered a copy of Zane Grey’s The Lone Star Ranger at the local
library. I shared a name with its protagonist – Buck Duane – and with a last
name like Spurlock, I seemed destined to be interested in cowboys. Western
fiction eventually led me to North Western fiction – a subgenre exploited by
Jack London, James Oliver Curwood, Jules Verne, Frederick Faust (Max Brand),
Ryerson Johnson, James Hendryx, Rex Beach and others. These authors anchored
the plots for most of their writing in this field with the Yukon and Alaska
gold rush. The extremes of the natural world in this setting – the terrible
cold, snow and ice, the rugged geography serving as a barrier between the gold
and men’s desire to possess it – required the writers to push their characters
to the limits of their physical and mental endurance. In cases, to survive,
characters had to exceed those limits. Hemingway’s
grace under pressure rarely appears
in these North Western narratives. Characters go to the brink and jump into the
abyss. This quality is part of what makes North Western stories appealing to me
– men and women must survive in what can only be described as an alien
landscape…Alien, yet still located on Earth…and these people willingly put
themselves into this struggle against Nature and against human nature.My
interest in the Wild West, and thence to North Western fiction, led to the
third influence on Fighting Alaska:
historical studies.I’ve
read a lot of books on Wild West history, and my stories are usually informed
by some element of my reading. The University of Nebraska’s Bison Books imprint
is a favorite resource for me.One
of the most popular topics for historians and readers in this period is, not
surprisingly, the gunfight at the OK Corral. A remarkable number of novels and
movies have used this event as a dramatic focus in their narratives. The people
involved were all, in one fashion or another, fascinating. As a result, I’ve
read a lot of books about Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday.The
mainstream knowledge about Earp focuses on Tombstone and its famous gunfight.
But Wyatt Earp had quite a career and life beyond that 1881 shootout. And his
time in Alaska during its gold rush aligns well with my interest in North West
fiction and its natural (for me, at least) extension to North West history. The
historical record of actual people’s experiences in the Yukon and Klondike are,
in many cases, far more dramatic and violent than the fictional narratives. For
example, the audacity of federal judge Arthur Noyes’ using the law to jump mining
claims in Nome, Alaska, sounds more like melodrama than truth. But the North West
at that time was just a colder version of the wide-open Wild West towns
pictured in many, many films.Which
brings me to the fourth influence on Fighting
Alaska: movies.The
obvious Hollywood productions aren’t on this list – Raging Bull, Rocky, and
so forth. Instead, the movies that stuck in my mind for years and that colored Fighting Alaska in some fashion were
lesser-known works that still deserve viewing: Emperor of the North (1973) and Hard
Times (1975). Both films feature excellent character actors famous for
their tough-guy roles – Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine and Keith Carradine in the
former, and Charles Bronson and James Coburn in the latter. Charles
Bronson’s character in Hard Times,
Chaney, is a reluctant, but effective, bare-knuckles fighter who certainly
influenced the character of Jean St. Vrain in Fighting Alaska. But instead of Bronson, it was a grizzled Randolph
Scott I pictured in my mind’s eye as the physical model for St. Vrain – the
rough-featured Scott of those western films he made with Budd Boetticher in the
late 1950s.All
these ingredients simmered in my head until the idea for Fighting Alaska bubbled up – a tale about a boxer in the North Western
gold rush who meets Wyatt Earp. The Fight
Card crew certainly has my thanks for providing an outlet for these
characters and situations.

Monday, May 11, 2015

1900 Alaska…Gold, greed, and gamblers – a dangerous
combination in a gold rush boomtown. Itinerant boxer Jean St. Vrain has a
lifetime of rootless wandering behind him and ten years of knuckle-busting
boxing, bar bouncing, and disillusionment. He wants to call quits to the fight
game, but he needs a way out. Joining a mob of desperate men heading for the Alaskan
gold fields, Jean is caught between crooked judges, crooked businessmen, a
soiled dove, and infamous gunman Wyatt Earp and his cronies. With his future
looking as harsh as the Alaskan landscape, Jean has one chance left – fight
again.